V WITH HOOK (was: RE: IPA Greek)

Julian,

> > 028A is ʊ LATIN SMALL LETTER UPSILON
> > 028B is ʋ LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK
> >
> > These are used for different sounds. I'm not sure that either name is
> particularly bizarre.
>
> I know what they *mean*.
> The name "V WITH HOOK" is strange because there is no hook in ʋ, in
> any of the several other senses that HOOK is used in IPA character
> names, or in any reasonable typographic sense. ...

Basically, everything you need to know can be culled from the relevant
UnicodeData.txt entries:

01B2;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH HOOK;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT V;;;028B;
028B;LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT V;;01B2;;01B2

These two characters *were* called script v in Unicode 1.0.

Somebody who was pulling together repertoire for the initial CD's and DIS
for 10646-1 back in 1990 had culled the capital letter from lists of African
alphabets and called it "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH HOOK", presumably
because it was hooky-looky, and because of all the other African letters
with hooks.

Part of the grand bargain involved in getting Unicode 1.0 and 10646 fused into
one virtual standard was that Unicode gave up the Unicode 1.0 character names where there
was a difference, and instead used the character names that were in the draft
for 10646. Some of the names of lowercase IPA characters got affected by that
decision.

It could just as well ended up LATIN SMALL LETTER HOOKY-LOOKY V-LIKE THINGIE.
At this point people need to get over name prescriptivism and realize that some
of these decades-old name decisions just happened, as it were. Better to simply
marvel at the weird oddities to be found when poking around in dusty character
name closets at this point. U+028B LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH HOOK still
gets the job done to represent the IPA voiced labiodental approximant symbol. ;-)

--Ken
Received on Thu Sep 12 2013 - 14:31:28 CDT